


Kylux Cantina Ficlets

by imochan



Series: Several Small Stories for Tumblr [6]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-20
Updated: 2017-04-19
Packaged: 2018-10-08 12:24:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10386609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imochan/pseuds/imochan
Summary: A collection of short ficlets written in response to prompts from theKylux Cantina. Updated weekly-ish.





	1. Peninsula

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the Week 1 theme of "Travel."
> 
> Benarmie, and a roadtrip to the shore.

Prompt:

_drive back home, still with nothing to say_

_Except that now you will uncode all landscapes_

_By this: things founded clean on their own shapes,_

_Water and ground in their extremity_

\- Seamus Heaney, "The Peninsula"

\--

Hux is asleep. Slumped slightly to the right, his chin tucked against his chest, mouth open, forehead resting against the car window, breathing slowed. It must have happened, Ben thinks, somewhere after the roundabout that got them onto the freeway, when Hux had last pointedly changed the radio station from rapidly staticking Top-40 to NPR. His hands are slack in his lap, a slice of fading, deep-orange sunshine crossing his face, rendering his closed lashes translucent, glittering. **  
**

It makes Ben’s stomach clench. His palms, on the steering wheel, feel suddenly damp.

_hey guess what i have my dad’s car_ , he’d texted that morning. _let’s go somewhere!!!_

_I have a paper due on Monday_ , Hux had sent, in reply, but when Ben pulled up to his apartment in the Oak Square student slums fifteen minutes later, it had only taken Ben honking seven times before Hux appeared, scowling lightly.

“After this,” he’d said, as he’d climbed into the passenger seat. “I’m getting a restraining order on you.”

“Big talk,” said Ben, and tossed the binoculars onto Hux’s lap.

“What’s—this,” Hux had picked them up gingerly, as if they were potentially retrieved from a public garbage can.

“Birdwatching,” said Ben. “We’re gonna go to the cliffs.”

Hux had said nothing, which apparently meant this was an acceptable offer.

Ben thinks now maybe he’s an idiot, for not realizing it sooner. He _is_ an idiot, he realizes, for wasting _three-and-a-half years_ pretending that his grudging, combative, insular and obsessive friendship with the weirdest, meanest kid in college wasn’t bound up also with desperate affection. He’s an idiot, he thinks, for not realizing that as soon as he found himself panicking at the prospect of graduation, as soon as thought about running—just for the day—to forget the fucking idea of it, as soon as he dragged Hux along with him, that that was it. That as soon as he got Armitage Hux out of dorm rooms and library carrels and shitty student bars, and into the ocean-washed spring sunshine, clean trainers scuffed with sand and wet mud, freckles on his nose, a sunburn just beginning to skim the surface of his nose, old binoculars slung around his neck and not in the least embarrassed about it—as soon as he got Armitage Hux to a place where Ben could watch him turn his immensely serious, overwrought focus toward tracking the flight of a cormorant along the curling surf—he should have realized sooner that this was a tremendously stupid idea, that this would be the thing that would finally doom him.

They’d been sitting on a flat, salt-scarred rock at the top of the cliffs. Hux with the binoculars lifted to his face, Ben sifting damp sand between his fingers. Hux had seen something out there, in the great grey wash of the ocean; he had said _Oh_ —very softly—and then nothing else. Ben had been quiet also: struck silent with a sudden, horrifying, plummeting eddy of desire.

He’d wanted to kiss Hux. Wanted to reach out with both hands and tug the binoculars from his eyes and pull him in by the fraying straps and—he’d wanted to hear Hux make that soft, unfamiliar generous ‘ _oh_ ’ of curiosity and enjoyment against his mouth. He wanted to taste the shape of it against his tongue, to pin it down like a specimen, to keep it from wriggling away into seafoam, muggy marsh-water memory.

He’d said something, just to cover up the pounding roar of his heartbeat in his own ears. Maybe it was something like: “Whas’it?”

“Mm.” Hux had lowered the binoculars, squinting into the distance. “I think it was a whale.”

And that had been it, the moment gone—except that the whole way back to the car, the whole time on the winding backroads, he had felt both buoyed and immensely heavy, thrumming with urgency, as if suddenly he had been given a map of a strange landscape, all the painstaking, beautiful logic of it laid out with the very certitude and confidence he lacked in taking the very first step.

_When he wakes up_ , thinks Ben, now. 

The sun is setting; something skitters gently, with terrifying lightness, inside his chest. 

_I’ll do it then._


	2. Pilgrimage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the Week 1 theme of "Travel." Prompt: Pilgrimage.
> 
> Hux says it's protocol. Ren knows differently.

Hux is nervous. Excited, even. Kylo barely needs to reach out and touch at the edges of the Force to sense it; he’s radiating the energy of it from his skin, in the stuttering fidget of his fingers on the shuttle console, tapping restless against his thighs, in the way that his usually even, implacable expression keeps pinching, twitching with each flicker of the console lights, of the comm static. **  
**

It is thrilling, in that it is something very new. In the scant year that Kylo has known him, now, Hux has emerged as a constant: something to prod at and pluck at and tease after, as if he might one day find the loose thread that will unravel the whole rigid braid of him. The consistency has been in his fight, his resistance to every bit of chaos Kylo has thrown down in front of him, inadvertently or otherwise. His pale, even skin—spacewhite and unblemished. His sharp little face. His bright, hungry eyes. His hard, brittle cage of a mind.

(Even when Kylo had managed two weeks ago to finally pin him down like a pink and wriggling bit of bait, Hux had maintained something of his reserve. His mouth had slackened, wet and open, when Kylo shoved his hand down the front of Hux’s trousers, and he’d choked softly, as he came sticky and hot all over Kylo’s fist, but he’d had that narrow knife-edge of hardness still. Kylo had felt the ragged, racing pulse in his throat, under his own needy and questing mouth, but Hux’s hands were never anything but steady.)    

“Who is she,” says Kylo. (It means: _Tell me again where we’re going, who we’re meeting._ It means: _I want to hear you say it._ It means: _I want to hear you say it when you’re in danger of letting your voice_ shake _with the feeling of it_.)

Hux glances at him, sidelong, from the pilot’s seat. “You were sent the brief. I know by now you’re not completely illiterate.”

It’s mean, but there’s nothing of the usual bite behind it.

“Why me,” he says, as the shuttle drops out of hyperdrive.

“Pardon?” says Hux. He’s distracted. In the viewpoint there is the wide and curving belly of an old Imperial station, pregnant and gleaming and spilling TIE fighters like spores. The comm spits docking instructions; Hux’s fingers punch the confirmation into the console with a little too much force.

“Why me,” says Kylo, again.

“It’s protocol,” says Hux.

It’s a lie, he knows. He can feel the little smudge of guilt edging along the latticework of Hux’s anxious, thrumming mind, like a smeared bit of rust on the bars. He’s engineered this, then, for some reason that Kylo does not yet fully understand.

The shuttle docks, and Kylo stands, tugging his cowl up around his face.

“Ren,” says Hux. “A moment—just.”

When Kylo turns Hux is straightening the collar of his own greatcoat, adjusting his cap. His face is averted to the task— _he is hiding_ , Kylo thinks, feeling the trembling little tendril of it like a mild shock, _he is hiding his own purposes_ —there is the faintest wash of a flush on his cheeks. It looks vaguely sickly in the dim light. Hux exhales, then, softly through his nose, and lifts his chin, imperious, to stare Kylo in the face. His lips are pursed, his eyes narrowed.

_Appraisal_ , thinks Kylo.

“Yes, I—” says Hux, after a beat. “I suppose that will do.”

“You suppose,” says Kylo.

Hux just brushes past him, silent; punches the door lock with his fist.

Kylo follows behind, closer than he needs to— _prod, pluck, tease, push, pinch_ —just so Hux knows he has not managed to phase him in the slightest. He squints out from under the heavy hem of his hood, into the bright lights of the docking bay, at the small crowd gathered at the foot of the shuttle’s ramp. Two Order officers in dark uniforms, a slight woman in front, in white, gold braiding at her shoulders.

The woman is older, a streak of pale silver crowning her dark and curly hair. She stands with her hands folded behind her back, her chin lifted, her mouth an even, steady line. Something aches distantly in Kylo’s chest, at the strange familiarity of it. (It is like the time once that he saw a sputtering holo of his grandmother, smiling, and found himself hating and loving that face too, like the other one he knew so much better.)

“Armitage,” she says.

“Grand Admiral Sloane,” says Hux, radiating all the warmth and smugness of showing off something like a favored possession. (The thought of this sends a ripple of cold, wet pleasure all the way to the base of Kylo’s spine.) “May I introduce to you the Master of the Knights of Ren.”


	3. Helm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the Week 4 theme of "The Five Senses."
> 
> Psychometry: The ability to discover facts about an event or person by touching inanimate objects associated with them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (warnings for Captured-By-The-Resistance!Hux, and Schrödinger's-Death!Kylo Ren)

They leave it with him. The door hisses shut behind them, and they leave it, sitting across from him on the thin metal table, positioned so that the deep black of the eye slits are facing him, staring him down. **  
**

He thinks at first it is a taunt. _Look at your end_ , he thinks, mimicking the harsh and suckered vowels of the New Republic. _Look it right in the eyes before we take you away to meet it._ And so he keeps his bound hands flat on the table, where they had been when they were with him for hours and hours and hours, and also where they were when left him, his palms sweating against the surface of it and the pain in his raw knuckles radiating up into the air, as if it will all dissipate.

Later—perhaps it is minutes, although maybe it is far longer than that—he will realize that it is instead a threat. He will be unable to keep his eyes from straying from it, and so he takes in the curve of the metal framing, the part that he always thought looked so ironically like an animal’s muzzle. He takes in the tombstone shape of it, the dull matte of the black, the scuffing on the shiny metal at the faceplate. He knows it is the one that was made after _Starkiller_ fell and Ren was forced to wander bare-faced and seething, weak and delirious, for weeks. He knows it is the one he himself came to know, strangely, with more anger and attachment, than the one that came before. He knows—this is the thing that makes his face tingle with heat, and his stomach clench with something other than hunger and tension—the shape of it from the moments he has touched the form of it with the flat of his palms and the tips of his fingers.

He thinks it is a threat because he is not sure, even now, teetering on the edge of exhaustion and implosion, that it had before this moment the puckered dent on the side of the skull plate. If he is logical, if he tries to be, he knows that it did not. That the last time he saw it it was whole and relatively clean: it was—he thinks of this now with a horrible and uncomfortable knot growing in the pit of his gut—tumbled upside-down on the floor of his own quarters. He had caught of glimpse of it when he turned his head on the mattress and stuffed his fist in his own mouth, to deny Ren the triumph of his own coming-undone, still so easily, with two fingers inside him and a mouth on his cock.

(This is wrong, he knows this also. The last time he saw it was from behind, in the act of leaving. But that truth is worse, somehow.)

Later still, with the artificial light still blazing overhead, he squints at the thing, the heavy, gross weight of it, the unyielding gaze of it mocking the throbbing pulse of his own headache, and he moves to touch it. (He wants to move it away.) He leans in, across the table, shunts his wrists through the cuffs and the braces as far as they will go, and finds that if he stretches, he can catch the underside of it with the tips of his fingers.

It feels cold. Against his sweating skin, his overexposed nerves, it’s almost frigid. He thinks, perhaps vaguely feverish, that he can almost smell it. The scent he used to pretend did not make his blood boil in a way other than anger. It would make his mouth water. (It was shameful). He swallows now, as if the very thought of it has caused salivary memory, as if it could cause his dry throat to well up again, hot and wet.

If he hooks his fingers, he can drag it forward towards him. He manages to get a grip on the metal of the faceplate, grabs at it like he is _furious_ , as if he could pull the uncertainty of Ren’s fate back from the darkness, haul him forward across the table, dig his fingers deep into the gullies of his skin and scream at him the thing that has plagued him since it all started to fall away around him— _don’t go don’t go you know they’ll take you back they’ll murder you you know this will be the end._

His palm slips. It grazes the cool metal. He feels, inside his own skull, the distinct and desperate images form: Kylo Ren the first time they met, unmasked and hooded with a thick and hungry look about him; Kylo Ren after their first argument, eyes sparking and muscles twitching, shoving him up against a wall with the force of a thought; Kylo Ren shaking in anger and loss and slashed across the face with a marker of his own failure; Kylo Ren after their first kiss, tasting of medication and softened nerves, letting him lean in and curl his fingers up against the sharp curve of jaw, holding him in place, for once.

_This is frail, impossible magic_ , he thinks. _And yet._

His face is wet. (He hates it.)

_And yet—_


	4. Workout

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the Week 5 theme of "Ritual." 
> 
> Prompt: "Wednesday is Kylo's leg day."

He rests back on his elbows, sheets cool under his forearms. He flexes: clenches his thighs and pushes up, from the hips. Above him, straddling, Hux shudders. Sharp little convulsion—his chin dips, mouth falls open. Tries to steady himself by bracing his palms on sweaty skin: fingertips slip, grip hard at Ren’s hipbone, Ren’s ribs. 

Ren lifts one arm from the bed, slaps them away.

“No hands,” he says. Repositions himself. “Stay there, right where I told you.”

“Fu— _uh_ ,” says Hux. Shaking, fingers twitching helplessly in the hot air between them. “It really is masochism all the way down with you, isn’t it.”

“Are you complaining?” Flex, clench.

“You could— _ah_. Use the gymnasium facilities. Like everyone else.”

He laughs. It get stuck halfway up his throat.

“You want to do this—” Clench. Flex. Roll the hips up, again. “—in the _gymnasium_.”

“That’s not what I—” Through gritted teeth now, cut off in a soft curse.

“Everyone would see. How filthy.”

Hux flushes: betrayal. “—you think you’re funny.”

“No.”

“No?”

“This is— _unh_ —very serious.” Brace, flex. Clench. Thrust up— _hard_ , now. “Very serious stuff.”

A burn building in his thighs, and one searing in his belly, too, somewhere deeper. Something twisting like a torn muscle in his chest when he watches Hux gulp for air, try for words and fail, when he watches himself slide—slow, tense, hot and rigid—into Hux’s slick pink hole. When he watches Hux’s cock bob up against his stomach, the head of it smeared wet. When he watches Hux flinch with the effort—no hands, no control—of holding himself upright, still, letting himself be fucked up _into._

He relaxes, just a little—lets his hips drop, slides halfway out. Hux hisses, quivers.

“Just twenty-five more,” he says. “And then, you can come.”


End file.
